Piano Music - Jean-Philippe Rameau

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Jean-Philippe_Rameau

📖 "Jean-Philippe Rameau was a fascinatingly paradoxical figure. Before finding success, at the late age of fifty, as a composer of operas, he was best known as the author of a learned treatise on the science of music that transformed thinking on the subject; but this progressive thinker, and church organist, also wrote musical farces for the Paris fairs. When he finally gained admittance to France's official opera theatre, the Académie Royale de Musique, he polarised opinion like no other artistic figure of his time. Rameau was an intellectual fundamentalist who believed that music was governed by a natural principle of his own discovery; and yet he excelled at entertainig the opera-going public, not least by writing the finest dance music of the 18th century.
Simon Trowbridge Rameau (2020)

📖 "Music is a science which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics. Notwithstanding all the experience I may have acquired in music from being associated with it for so long, I must confess that only with the aid of mathematics did my ideas become clear and did light replace a certain obscurity of which I was unaware before. Though I did not know how to distinguish the principle from the rules, the principle soon offered itself to me in a manner convincing in its simplicity. I then recognized that the consequences it revealed constituted so many rules following from this principle. The true sense of these rules, their proper application, their relationships, their sequence (the simplest always introducing the less simple, and so on by degrees), and finally the choice of terms: all this, I say, of which I was ignorant before, developed in my mind with clarity and precision. I could not help thinking that it would be desirable (as someone said to me one day while I was applauding the perfection of our modern music) for the knowledge of musicians of this century to equal the beauties of their compositions. It is not enough to feel the effects of a science or an art. One must also conceptualize these effects in order to render them intelligible."
Jean-Philippe Rameau Treatise on Harmony (1722)

📖 "Rameau belonged to the age of the Encyclopédie; he was interested in the totality of human nature, its contrasting beauty and ugliness, its violences and weaknesses. He did not always succeed in bringing his characters to vibrant life; his long dialogues were still highly stylized, and the conventions of declamations - proper, moderate and measured - still largely respected. But sometimes, suddenly, a gust of realism rushes in to disturb the majestic folds of finery, to scatter the theatrical paraphernalia, blow away the masks and the wigs. At that moment, living humanity emerges…"
Reynaldo Hahn On Singers and Singing. Lectures and an Essay

Jean-Philippe Rameau

1683 - 1764
Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer and music theorist of the 18th century.

📖 "The expression of thought, of sentiment, of the passions, must be the true aim of music."

📖 "Nature endows us with the feeling that moves us in all our musical experiences; we might call her gift instinct."

📖 "I try to conceal art with art."

📖 "We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking."

📖 "Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables."

📖 "When reason and instinct are reconciled, there will be no higher appeal."

📖 "Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words."

📖 "Verse, singing, and speech have a common origin."

Quotes by Jean-Philippe Rameau

🔔 Reload the page a few times if you see orange widgets instead of books and music.

Recordings of Rameau's Keyboard and Other Music

Pièces de clavecin - Complete Works for Harpsichord
Pieter-Jan Belder, harpsichord

L'Oeuvres pour Clavecin - Complete Works for Harpsichord
Scott Ross, harpsichord
Recorded in 1975 at Château d’Assas

Nouvelles Suites
Alexandre Tharaud, piano

Documentary about Rameau

Jean Philippe Rameau, le maître du baroque, l'incompris magnifique (Documentaire/ Documentary ENG SUB)
By Olivier Simonnet, ARTE

Keyboard works by Jean-Philippe Rameau

Premier livre de pieces de clavecin (Paris, 1706, repr. 1741 as Pièces de clavecin … oeuvre premier): Prélude, a; Alemande, a; 2e alemande, a; Courante, a; Gigue, a; 1ère sarabande, a; 2e sarabande, A; Vénitienne, A; Gavote, a; Menuet, a; Jc, G

Pieces de clavessin avec une methode pour la mechanique des doigts (Paris, 1724/R, rev. 1731 as Pieces de clavecin avec une table pour les agrémens): Menuet en rondeau, C; Allemande, e; Courante, e; Gigue en rondeau, e; 2e gigue en rondeau, E; Le rappel des oiseaux, e; lr rigaudon, e; 2d rigaudon, E; Double du 2d rigaudon, E. Musette en rondeau, E; Tembourin, e; La vilageoise, rondeau, e; Les tendres plaintes, rondeau, d; Les niais de Sologne [with 2 doubles], D; Les soupirs, D; La joyeuse, rondeau, D; La follette, rondeau, D; L’entretien des Muses, d; Les tourbillons, rondeau, D; Les cyclopes, rondeau, d; Le lardon, menuet, D; La boiteuse, d; Jc, G

Nouvelles suites de pieces de clavecin … avec des remarques sur les différens genres de musique (Paris, c1729–30, rev. 2/after 1760/R): Allemande, a; Courante, a; Sarabande, A; Les trois mains, a; Fanfarinette, A; La triomphante, A; Gavotte [with 6 doubles], a; Les tricotets, rondeau, G; L’indifferente, g; Menuet, G; La poule, g; 2e menuet, g [intended to be paired with the previous menuet]; Les triolets, G; Les sauvages, g; L’enharmonique, g; L’egiptienne, g; Jc, G

Les Indes galantes, balet, reduit à quatre grands concerts (Paris, c1736), symphonies arr. Rameau for hpd [28 movts in G (which mistakenly includes movts from the entrée Les sauvages); 24 movts ed. G. Sadler: Rameau, Les Indes galantes: the Composer’s Transcriptions for Harpsichord (London, 1979)]

Five pieces arr. solo hpd in Pieces de clavecin en concerts (Paris, 1741): La Livri, rondeau gracieux, c; L’agaçante, G; La timide, 1er rondeau gracieux, a; 2e rondeau, A; L’indiscrette, rondeau, B♭; Jc, G; facs. (Geneva, 1982)

La Dauphine, g, ?c1747 or later,

Les petits marteaux [attrib. Rameau, Pn Vm72108, anon. in Pa MS6820] (?before 1754)

facs. in Fuller (1983)

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